Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
by WkCIA
Summary: On Request- An Adeptus Mechanicus Magos finds the true meaning of Knowledge, Wisdom and Love; unfortunately, she does so in the middle of a ship trapped in the Warp!
1. Chapter 1

**Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend**

Carbon is a common element throughout the Galaxy.

It comprises all organic materials, a great number of chemical compounds, and is the component part of a vast majority of the living things in the great Imperium of Mankind.

Even the Adeptus Mechanicus, they who shun the biological, find it most useful, as pencils, lubricants, warheads and component bits of all sorts of machinery that they made and used. It was so ubiquitous that some adepts forgot that the element existed, or forget that the Machine Spirit has blessed humanity with a material so useful.

***

_990.M41, Mars, Segmentum Solar, Olympus Mons, Shrine of the Omnissiah_

Five cloaked figures stood on a raised platform in front of the candidate. They were shrouded in robes, all emblazoned with a stylized cogwheel, the cloth itself clean other than for the permanent sheen of oil soaked into the fabric.

The platform itself seemed to float in the air in the chamber they had decided to hold the impromptu examination. The panel of five seemed to tower over the candidate. Many a Mechanicus Magos dissertation had fallen in this chamber, ripped to shreds by the examiners as insufficiently exemplary of the Omnissiah's grace. They had stood there, nearly mute, as the judges on high seemed to float in the air impossibly, without aid of jets or fans, and crushed their hopes and dreams for becoming one of the Omnissiah's select- a Magos, one who had contributed materially to the Quest for Knowledge.

Of course, Magos Ally Terenas Danar felt quite relaxed now, standing in front of the tribunal, not only because she had stood through this grueling routine nearly 56 years earlier, but because she already had been bestowed the title of Magos, and there was not much they could do to strip it. Plus, she'd known for a long while that the platform was simply a gravitonic repulsor set into a superconducting medium to control the level of gravity bleed into local four dimensional space; the same stuff that provided artificial gravity to his Divine Majesty's ships. All Adepts and higher ranked Mechanicus members knew that.

Her latest dissertation, however, had raised eyebrows.

"We welcome one of our own," the head of the panel squawked in Machine, a series of clicks and densely coded machine language that only very few non-Mechanicus understood, let alone spoke. A series of clicks and other computational noises sounded from him. "The five of us have bonded into the same distributed datastream server and are speaking through me," he said. "You may rest assured that we are all listening to you."

An old trick, that. Not only did it save time having to confer, even in Machine, and shared thoughts and resources across all five of the panel, it scared the living daylights out of even Adepts of the Mechanicus. It was fighting through that fear, conquering it, that set a clever adept on the path to Magos.

Ally bowed slightly and acknowledged the panel one by one, greeting them formally in Machine.

"We shall get to business," the head judge said. "We are pleased to note that we do not intend to conduct disciplinary hearings in this chamber, and your previous findings on data stream transactional and communication protocols across disparate Machine Spirits remain untainted and useful in the Quest for Knowledge."

Ally nodded.

"We also acknowledge that you have been seconded to the Ordo Hereticus of his Divine Majesty's Inquisition on the staff of the human Baseline Alera Jumil as of 955.M41 after your successful investigations into serious data fraud and heresy on Forge World Lucanis II and are not required to extend the Quest for Knowledge to less able adepts as part of your duties."

The judge paused for a moment as the cogitators that made up their minor hive mind worked. "Although you have been teaching appropriate hours of correspondence courses to tech adepts on Forge World Tanis."

She again waited respectfully for the five judges to process this data.

"We are simply curious," the judge said, and it was at that moment that a hololith set into the platform flashed into life and displayed the text of her latest research, "as to your career branching into biological and sociological research. Is there some application to your previous work on Machine Spirits?"

Ally smiled, a thoroughly un-Machine like expression, but one which fit her face perfectly, even though most of it was no longer flesh. "No, Magi," she said in a burst of somewhat amused Machine. "It was sociological research based on personal experience and empirical data collection." She squawked a command to the hololith, and it began to scroll to appropriate points of text as she continued to explain her work. "I wanted to posit a theory based on what glimpses of data the Omnissiah deigned to show me, and see if my colleagues had any corroborating data or alternate theses which may apply to the gathered data."

The head judge nodded when its component Magi understood what she was saying. "So you are saying that… it is entirely possible that Baseline humans are the driving force for the Omnissiah's Quest for Knowledge?"

Ally gestured oddly, a Mechanicus equivalent of a non-committal shrug. "I am simply saying that the glory of the Omnissiah may be found if we take the entirety of humanity, and the individual Quests for Knowledge of each individual human into account."

As the panel twittered at the implications of her thesis, Ally almost smiled gently at their confusion. They could have asked a question that would explain her thesis far more succinctly, but they had overlooked, in their typical Mechanicus disdain for the ornamental.

They could have asked how she got the diamond Aquila necklace she had clasped to her neck.

***

_987.M41, Dauntless Class Light Cruiser _Swift Justice, _Cadia en route Tantis III, Segmentum Obscuras_

Two men stood next to an Imperial Shuttlecraft, a fifty metre long ship docked inside a cavernous hangar within a spacecraft a few kilometers long. Emblazoned in bright colours on the side of the shuttlecraft was the picture of a Dauntless Class Light Cruiser, its elegant lines broken only by the proclamation that the Shuttle is the _Swift Justice- 1 Shuttlecraft._ One of the men was not in a good mood. Servitors avoided the two in their rounds, except for the unlucky two flanking one of them.

"Look, you can't strip her hull radiation plating!" thundered a young pilot to the mechanic shrinking physically from the verbal assault. "It's an insult to the Machine Spirit of the old Girl, it's an insult to me, and it's an insult to the maintenance department of the _Swift Justice!_"

"We don't have any left, Lieutenant!" the mechanic stammered. "The new Magos in charge of 1-Flight Hangar," and he emphasized the word _Magos_, "demands the hull plating, and she needs it now! We've radioed the Quartermaster's department for hull plating but they won't be here for a day or two, and the SJ-1 is not scheduled to do anything for 2 weeks! You're on furlough on upper decks for that time anyway!"

The pilot simmered. "The Mechanicus stripping a machine?" he cried. "Impossible! Sacrilegious! I'm going to take this to the cogboy myself!"

The mechanic took the lifeline to deflect responsibility. "Yes, you do that, sir. I'll postpone work til you work the matter out with her." The two servitors following him twittered their concurrence.

Suddenly realizing that he had defeated himself with his ranting, the pilot glowered as he turned to stalk off. "You had better Emperor damned well do that."

Flight captain Garen Danar worked himself into a pleasantly apoplectic rage as he paced toward the Flight Hangar's maintenance workshop. Imagine the new Magos stripping his old Girl! Enginseer Idenus had never tried to do that in 20 years as Master of the Flight Hangar. Her Machine Spirit would never forgive him if he didn't try to get them to leave her alone. And he was having such a pleasant holiday on upper decks too, before they'd radioed to inform him of the stripping. He reached the door, slammed his hand into the door activator, and prepared a furious diatribe to be delivered to the nearest person festooned with the monstrous mechanical gadgets that were the mark of the Mechanicus.

He was rather struck dumb when the pretty looking girl in mechanicus robes in the room looked up from her data pad and smiled at him.

"Can I help you, Flight Officer?" she said, and her voice was sweet and gentle and nothing like the tinny vox coder's squawk that Enginseer Idenus had.

"I…" gasped Garen, his hand still stuck in midair. "I… Could I see Magos Terenas?" he finished, rather weakly.

"You're talking to her, Flyboy," she smirked, and one of her eyes twinkled with delight.

The stunned pilot looked her over. She looked positively… _normal_. She had long brown hair, tied up in a severe pony tail. Her brow had metal Mechanicus implants, but they only framed her face in a most becoming manner, which still wrinkled in mirth in a human way he had never seen on a Magos, only bare initiates. Her robes didn't hide a single curve on her body, and her hands…

It was only then that Garen Danar noticed them. Her right eye was ever so slightly off colour, and seemed to focus entirely too intently. A slight, almost imperceptible line ran across the top of her scalp and down the sides of her face, where the plastiflesh parted. Her hands, which looked as if they were gloved, were entirely made of metal.

One of them held a tiny little gem in it.

"I came here," Garen said, slightly hesitantly, "to ask that you not remove the hull plating from shuttle SJ-1."

Her eyebrow arched up, just so. "Oh?" She said, somewhat surprised. "Do you have a reason, or are you just afraid your old girl is going to lose her modesty?" She smiled and spoke up again as he started to speak. "I checked up the manifests, and noticed that you're not going to be using her for a while. I need the carbon plating for a diamond control moderator crystal in one of the fusion reactors powering the hangar's main doors." She tilted her head to the side, slightly. "Is that reason enough, which I don't need to give you, Flight Officer?"

Garen resisted the urge to correct her with his correct rank, for he was sure that she was using it to irritate him. "Magos," he said, his annoyance beginning to show again, "that radiation shielding is vital to anyone who flies the SJ-1. If another pilot takes her out for a spin because he can't get his own shuttle, if some idiot mechanic doesn't replace the shielding… any number of things make it unacceptable."

"I understand your concern, Mr Danar," the Magos said. Her body started to tick as some cogitator installed within began to work. "There are many myriad uses of carbon, such as that within the old girl's radiation shielding. But some uses of carbon are more important than others; some ways carbon is made are more important than others. For example, The chances of one of your disasters occurring, compared to the chances of a catastrophic failure of the main hangar door reactors and the damage that will cause are far smaller." She paused for a while, waiting for her words to sink into the pilot. "I am sure you know what will happen if the doors suddenly decompress the hangar because the shield generators fail, or the fusion reactor experiences a meltdown. I, as Magos of this hangar deck, need to ensure the functioning of this deck to its fullest capacity and the safety of the thousand or so people who work her under me. If we were not so desperately short on carbon, I would not have dreamt of removing it from SJ-1. But needs must."

She lifted up the diamond in her hand, shaped perfectly as a regulator for the reactors. "Your carbon radiation shielding does its work. As does this diamond. But the Diamond is better; it does more, it is more important. Let me use your carbon shielding and turn it into something better than it is."

Garen shook his head in defeat, the logic inexorable. Just as he expected from a Mechanicus Magos. "Very well. Take the SJ-1 off the active duty list, however."

"I will," the woman said, smiling slightly. "I understand. It is difficult for graphite sometimes to see how diamonds need to do their work."

Something cold snapped inside Garen.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked, very softly. His voice was low, almost hoarse.

A worried frown crossed Ally's face. "Don't get me wrong, Mr Danar." She flipped open a panel next to her and placed the diamond inside its innards. The panel began to whine softly as some turbine within it began to move. "I understand your point of view. But amongst the common men it is sometimes difficult to see the viewpoint of the bigger picture."

The Flight captain's voice was now very quiet. "I see. And what is it difficult for the common man to see?"

The Magos tilted her head to the side slightly. "To use a quaint biological term that my parents said to me a while before they binary bonded into one brain, you cannot see the forest for the trees. You lived on a planet with plant life using chlorophyll reactions from sunlight, yes?" She did not wait for his answer.

"There are certainly things which are important to a tree, and that tree which is important to many other things. But the forest, that the tree is in, is a far greater being, far greater than the tree could ever be. It too, has things it must do, and they are, by mere virtue of being bigger, are more important."

Garen was going to say something obscene in response, but the wail of the emergency warp egress klaxons drowned him out.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

The communicator board next to the Magos lit up and chimed. Ally patched it through. "Rose sends Aeronautica," came the somewhat garbled transmission. "Classify?" The techpriestess looked somewhat warily at Garen for a moment before she replied. "No. No need." A low rumble reverberated through the deck plating, and suddenly the lights flickered, and then came back up, although they were noticeably dimmer than before. "What's going on, Ma'am?"

A hololith display lit up, showing the face of a young woman, with dark features and long, snow white hair. "I'm on the bridge with the Captain. It seems our Gellar field almost collapsed, but engineering managed to salvage most of the ship." Garen paled visibly at that news, for the Gellar field was the only thing keeping the horrors of the warp from seeping onto a ship while it was in the warp. "The problem was that about a third of the ship was exposed to the warp." The woman on the screen shrugged, as if this was only a minor inconvenience. "Exposure was randomized throughout the ship. I wanted to see if you were all right." She turned to Garen and smiled wickedly. "Who's the boyfriend?"

The Magos blanched and made an extremely human gesture, sticking her tongue out in disgust. She ignored the woman, much to Garen's relief. "This is Flight Lieutenant Garen Danar. We were having... discussions... about the hangar bay doors."

"They didn't depressurize, did they?"

Ally shrugged. "Wouldn't know. I just put a diamond control modulator into the fusion reactor."

"Ah, Frak," came the response. "We need one on the bridge for Astrogation. We're still stuck in the warp, and we need to get out post haste." She grimaced slightly. "Normally I'd just ask you to sit tight, Magos, but I need you to bring one up to the bridge as soon as you can."

The woman in the mechanicus robes sighed. "All right. My communicator's working, so you can keep in contact. I'll see you in a bit, Inquisitor." She thumbed off the hololith and stood up, dusting herself down.

Garen was still struck dumb by the incongruity of the youthful, gentle face and the terrifying power she represented on the hololith when he felt a tug on his sleeve.

"Are you coming?" Ally asked. "It'd be a pity for me to leave you here to die."

For some reason, as they left the control room, Garen Danar found that quite comforting.

***

Ally Terenas wondered why she had brought the meatbag along with her.

It wasn't as if she felt like he was a bad person, or that he didn't have some knowledge worthy of the Grace of the Omnissiah, but a Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus was a respected being throughout the Imperium, and as skilled a pilot the premier shuttle pilot of one of his Divine Majesty's ships might be, there were many such men who could claim such skill.

In short, he wasn't so special, and as a meatbag, distressingly prone to dying.

And she wasn't planning on using him as a human shield, either; the thought was rather anathema to her. Even before meeting her incongruous mistress, who had a merciful edge so completely out of kilter with her job and duties, Ally knew she had a rather wide view of the power of the Omnissiah's grace. Perhaps it was a weakness of the flesh, but when she saw her fellow humans suffer, especially the ones without her armoured skeleton, she always felt a pang of sadness at the loss of knowledge in the Omnissiah's grace. And while some of her colleagues argued quite reasonably that the total loss of Knowledge would be less in those who died younger than _her_, a Magos in service for many hundreds of years, something in Ally mourned for the fact that the young could never know more than a tiny grasp of the Glory of Knowledge, and that they _could _have discovered more. She was loathe to force any human to sacrifice their chance to find Knowledge over her own, and doing anything but giving him a lasgun and telling him to stay put would very likely lead to his death.

But then, in the current circumstances, she wasn't even so sure _she_ could survive.

Her internal cogitators worked out an appropriate plan of attack. In her mind's eye, one of her cogitators brought up the internal schematics of the ship from its memory, and judging from what the inquisitor had said, each individual room had been either protected by the Gellar field, or open to the warp. Each room would be untainted; or tainted. The logic was simple- she would traverse as few rooms as possible, hoping that probability would work her way and that she would run into as few roaming Chaos monstrosities as possible.

She began to turn toward the connecting hallways going to the main trunk passageways through the ship, but she registered the pilot's hand grip ever so slightly harder on her shoulder. She could have ignored it completely, but there was something about the urgency with which he did so that made her turn around.

"That passageway's been modified," The pilot said to her. "It leads to a dead end." he shrugged. "It's been like that for about three years. The last census we had was about five years ago."

It was at that point that Ally revised her plan. Clearly, on a ship as old as the _Swift Justice_, not even a ten year old schematic would be anything but woefully inaccurate. Now she had no idea whatsoever how to get to the Bridge.

He gently steered her toward a different set of halls and bulkheads. "I've been working around here for most of my life," he said. "Lucky, too, that I'm an officer, or I wouldn't know topside that well either if I was just a rating." Then he turned to her, and there was a slightly incredulous look on his face. "Wait... aren't you a Magos?" The full ramifications hit him. "Don't you know???"

Ally looked askance at him, ignoring the question, but a sour note crept into her normally sweet voice. "Can you guide me to the Bridge?"

The pilot frowned slightly. "I can." He fidgeted slightly with his uniform collar as the sheer oddness of the situation spread over him. He, a mere human, telling a representative of the divine manifestation of Knowledge herself, how to get somewhere. "You know," he said, "that's probably more excitement I've had in the past five minutes than I've had in nearly twenty years of service." He tilted his head. "And you know, I really have a lot more questions to ask, but I'm sure there are more important things to worry about."

As he moved forward, somehow placing himself in front of his companion (How... oddly protective?) Ally knew why she had brought the meatbag along.

He might be the only one who could save them all.

***

Garen had led the two of them across three untainted rooms when she started to notice it.

"Can you hear that?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said, almost matter of factly, but a worried frown creased his brow. "The ship's not breathing."

Ally nodded. She knew exactly what he meant, for the Mechanicus and Men who lived on ships knew that the hulking monstrosities were not simply inert machines- ships were alive, and filled with the reassuring sounds of life, be they pumping of air exchanges, the happy blinking of cogitator warning lights, or the soft sounds of spoken conversation.

She couldn't hear _anything_. Not footsteps on deck plating; not mice scurrying through crevices, not even the slight ozone twang of electronics at work.

All around them was silence.

"She's never done that in my life," Garen said, and the Magos saw his adam's apple bobble in anxiety.

The two strained for a few moments longer, listening for _anything_ other than the sound of their voices and their breathing. A few random clicks emanated from her, but that was the sound of her cogitators working, not the ship around them.

Ally heard a loud splash. She whipped her head around to the source of the noise, her hands now suddenly a mass of mechandrites.

Nothing.

Just a small pool of some dark liquid, near one of the bulkheads. Another pool suddenly appeared with another loud splash, about a foot away from the other.

And then another, a foot away from the second one. The trail of little puddles moved in a straight line, from one bulkhead to the other parallel to it. As they appeared, the puddles eventually formed into imprints.

Imprints of human feet.

Then Ally caught the metallic tang of iron in the air, and realised the liquid was a dark, lurid red.

The trail of bloody footprints seemed to ignore them as they splashed across the corridor, only to end a foot away from another bulkhead.

Ally suddenly sensed something she at least knew about- the human pheromone for unrelenting _terror_, and looked around at her guide. He would have looked vaguely impassive to the ordinary human, but she noticed his dilated pupils, the raised hair, and the immediate twelve percent efficiency boost to his respiratory system as fear and adrenaline coursed through his veins.

The Magos nodded toward the door. The man stood there, stock still, as if frozen.

Then Ally gently took his hand in hers, now transformed back into hands, and she felt him physically relax, as his heightened awareness clambered down from its more feral instincts to something akin to that which had been trained into him by two decades in his Divine Majesty's service.

When she reached the door at the end of the corridor and punched her access codes in to let it move aside for her, the man beside her spoke up.

"I'm sorry," he croaked, his voice shaky. "by the Emperor, I've never, ever seen..."

And then Ally said something she had thought she would never say to a meatbag.

"It's all right. I haven't either."

She almost smiled in reflex when she saw his mouth quirk up in spite of his fear at her joke.

"This is rather odd," Garen suddenly said, and pointed his head at some small fragments of debris on the ground near the door. There was an exposed space in the bulkhead, leaving open wiring and piping that ran inside the ship's wall. The space was a neat square, about the size of an access hatch, and shards of what appeared to be plastic lay scattered around the exposed wiring. She stooped down to look at the pieces of rubbish, brushing her robes closer to her body. One of her cogitators picked up a slight change in composition in the air, and she set one of her computers onto its analysis.

With a sudden rush of amusement, her cogitator spat out a heightened pheromone count in her companion, associated with human sexual mating rituals. She'd known that scent many a time, even from the most rarefied of her male colleagues. It never seemed to be voluntary; always seemed to arise at the strangest of situations; discussing experimental results, loading servitors onto cargo barges, even when she was performing repairs on herself.

Men. She smiled at their simplicity.

The fragment in her hand was a simple carbon polymer, probably some sort of panelling that had been shattered by the rigours of warp travel. It was about half an inch long and only a sliver wide. It was bent into right angles about two thirds along its length. The bending did not appear to be caused by whatever had caused the panelling to shatter, however, but that was only what a quick overview with her artificial eye told her. She'd probably need the services of a proper lab to be able to determine the exact forces upon the shard. Her brow creased, though, when she took in the rest of the shards around her feet.

They all were bent in at right angles.

The probability of a random explosion causing that was vanishingly small, but anything could happen in the warp. Ally simply supposed it was one of those things that happened in a place where the laws of physics and probability quite simply broke down.

She did stay squatting there, however, performing a more thorough check of all the shards, making sure they were all bent... somewhat unnecessarily, for she was luxuriating guiltily in the hormones her companion behind her was now venting profusely into the air as he gazed at her form from behind. Her mouth quivered slightly upwards... _why on Mars_ _did she want a Baseline to look at her like that?_ She hadn't been attracted to one in...

_Decades_, one of her cogitators informed her. _And of all the places to start feeling like a Baseline again!_ her mind chided her.

She informed herself that significantly stressful situations brought out strange emotional reactions in even the Mechanicus.

_Get Up_, she told herself. _If only for the poor Meatbag's sake_.

No, she said, smiling now.

She was broken from her reverie when she heard the sound of screaming.


	3. Chapter 3

The scream was frantic, mingled with all the pain and horror and terror a human could inject into one plaintive wail.

The odd thing was the Engineer could pick out distinct words though plating and plasteel and reinforced bulkhead armour. The very odd thing was that they were in High Gothic.

Punctuated by fits of wheezing and anguished cries of pain, came the word...

"Help."

Her ears picked up the sound, and one of her cogitators triangulated the location. It wasn't too far away, just a slight detour from their route. She dashed off in a different direction, her suddenly confused companion sliding to a stop and following after her.

They ran a few rooms, their drabness completely lost on Ally. Another scream cut through the silence.

It was coming from the next room.

Ally's hand flew to the console next to the door and swiftly punched in a series of codes. The door slid open, and she almost vaulted through.

Behind her, she could sense the pilot hurrying after her, a sense of confusion in his movements. He had his laspistol out, but he looked as if he wasn't sure why he needed it unholstered.

In front of her, she saw it.

The room itself was clean, pure, white. Smooth lines along the walls, functional machinery in the middle of the room. They seemed to be working away at some problem, clicking and beeping happily, as if everything was fine. Ally's eyes widened. There were no purity seals, no devotionals; no unique features on the machines, as if they had been enslaved and removed of their individuality. An abomination.

Ally gasped and almost cried at the desecration. Then she looked away from the machines Around the walls was a clear transparent aluminium window strip, and she wished she hadn't seen it.

There was blood spattered across the window from the other side. Beyond, in the next room, Ally saw mewling figures strapped to racks, screaming as machines attached to the racks picked at skin and began to delicately flay them.

"By the Emperor," she mouthed in horror.

"What?" came the response from the pilot.

Excusing his callousness for a baseline coping mechanism, Ally flew to the control consoles in the centre of the room. They looked like a standard imperial control layout; she began to input commands. Hopefully she could stop these poor enslaved machines from committing such terrible sins on their human friends...

"Ally, what in the name of the Emperor are you doing?"

Annoyed now by her companion, Ally ignored him and started moving through the command file system. She could input the commands to stop this butchery. Through the window strips, she could see some of the not yet flayed humans perk up, as if they had seen their saviour- a Priestess of the Machine God! She could sense the hope, and the hurried encouragement.

Just a few more commands...

Garen slammed his hand down on the control console, aborting her release command to all the machinery in the local net.

"What the frak are you on about?" Ally now screamed, turning to the pilot. "I'm trying to save them!"

"What?" said Garen, and now his brow was creased with utter confusion.

Ally had no time for this. She shoved the apparently oblivious pilot aside and began to input the release command codes.

She saw the machines in the charnel house through the window begin to close down. She breathed a sigh of relief, and wondered why she felt a wind tug at her robes.

Her musing was cut short, as she was suddenly thrown to one side, not able to input the final commands. She hit the floor, struggling with whatever had blindsided her, when she realised, with a quick flex of her wrist, that it was a Baseline, Garen at that, whom she tossed aside as if he was so much a toy. The pilot crashed into a heap near the control consoles.

If he was hurt, he did not show it other than a quick, bitten down wince. He was immediately on his feet again, blocking her from the control console.

"ARE YOU INSANE?" they finally both screamed at each other.

"DO YOU NOT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR MEATBAG COLLEAGUES?" Ally cried, only to be drowned out by the incredulous shaking terror of Garen's "YOU NEARLY FRAKKING ROSLINED US, YOU CRAZY MECHANICUS BITCH!"

It was at that point that Ally suddenly realised that her surroundings had changed. The clean machinery was now the reassuring clutter of Imperial technology, purity seals adorning holy, individualistic cogitators. The window strips now... simply showed black, for the Gellar Field was blocking the view of the warp.

"WE'RE IN AIRLOCK CONTROL 2!" shouted Garen, although his breathing began to slow a little. "You were about to cycle the outer airlock babbling about "setting them free."" He looked a look of disgust at the engineer. "I don't know about you, but you don't Roslin people lightly." He shuddered. "Especially not into the Warp."

Ally looked around, utterly confused. "It was..." she began to click as her visual recordings of the past five minutes played in her head again and again. It was all verifiable, and the hash marks and checksums on the data showed no sign of tampering. She looked askance at Garen. "Didn't you hear screaming?"

His expression told her everything. He hadn't heard a thing.

Her mind began to whirl, playing the data over and over again. The clicking from her body began to increase as she put more processing power into it. She saw it! She was sure! Saw machines desecrated and men and women flayed alive by some aberrant mutations of the Omnissiah's benign machine spirits. She'd heard their screams, the begging for it to stop, the little reptilian twitchings and gutteral mouthings of the tortured as the baseline's minds began to shut down from the pain. It was real. It had been real! It must have been...

She suddenly felt a hand on her face. Her mind quickly switched some processor time to her eyes, to see the Garen, concerned look in his eyes, look deeply into hers, asking, searching for something. His fingers were gently guiding her head, as if he was inspecting an STC boilerplate.

Then he put his arms around her, hugging her, and although she was deeply surprised, Ally accepted the physical assurance gratefully.

* * *

Five minutes later, Ally spoke up.

"Why are you huggin me?"

The answer was somewhat matter of fact. "You were crying." The pilot withdrew from his embrace, and for some very odd reason Ally wanted the reassurance of another human's presence, even a Baseline's.

She stood up from where she had been sitting on the ground, smoothing out her robes. Bits of clutter fell from them onto the ground. She was in the process of helping Garen up when one of her cogitators flagged it for her notice.

Every single piece of clutter and debris in the room was bent at right angles. Glass, plastic, metal, even _bits of hair_.

"How odd," Ally said, as Garen led her back toward his original route.

* * *

The Magos and the pilot were at the junction of a corridor leading across the entire spine of the ship when they found their first sign of human life.

The corridor was the main access across the vessel connecting most of the ship's residential areas to its workplaces; it was a wide thoroughfare, able to take wheeled vehicles as well as many pedestrians. It was mostly empty now, the blast doors installed at regular intervals now slammed down shut, and still nothing could be heard from any of the access ports, cogitators, or air fans.

Ally heard susurrations of breath as she stepped out into the corridor. There sounded like there were several. Her pheromone sensors found fear, anxiety, and an overwhelming sense of… something she couldn't place. She put her hand to Garen's chest, who readily stepped back. Steadily, comfortingly, she called out in her voice, suddenly glad that she was vain of it and had installed a voxcoder in addition to her biological vocal cords.

"Hello?" she called out. "I'm Ally Tanendar. I'm with Garen Danar. Are you all right?"

She heard very soft whispering. It would not have been audible to a Baseline ear. There was no response.

"Hello?" Garen called out. Still nothing.

Ally's left eye began to hum slightly as the auspex feed built into it began to scan the corridor ahead. She could detect a very slight waver between two bulkhead walls on her infrared scans. It was good camouflage, good enough to defeat a handheld device and an unpracticed eye.

Ally spoke up. "We're humans. We're going to come and see you and see if you need anything, all right?" She took a few steps forward. She turned to the pilot. "You get down and stay back, you hear?" he nodded.

Ally Terenas, soothingly speaking the entire time, opened the access hatch to maintenance alcove 761B, and was shot in the chest for her trouble.

* * *

Garen's eyes widened, but the Magos motioned him back, despite the fact her face was screwed up in pain.

Smoke curled up from Ally's midsection, the synthflesh coating parting to reveal a fairly solid adamantium casing.

A woman with a Navy uniform with the rank pips of a Lieutenant stood menacingly at the entrance to the alcove. Three children sat behind her in an access alcove recess set into the bulkhead. The children were young, with only one of them looking as if they had reached their tenth year. The sides of the little hole were covered in some sort of durasteel alloy plating, with several layers of plastic and metal for each sheet. The oldest gingerly fingered an unactivated stun baton behind her. A Navy-issue shotgun lay across the Lieutenant's hands, still smoking.

Garen knew the pretty woman, whose features were crossed with a deep concern to keep calm for the children, and cold, unreasoning terror.

"Ludmila?" he said?

The Lieutenant, who looked as if she was about to load another shell into the Magos, turned to Garen. "Garen?" She turned back to the Magos. "Oh frak."

"It's all right, it's all right," Ally said, panting slightly, as she ordered her internal cogitators not to process the pain signals coming from her synthflesh coat. She pointed to the weapon in Ludmila's hands. "It's a Navy shotgun. My exeskeleton's rated against bolts."

The two humans' eyes widened. A bolt was a rocket propelled grenade several inches across.

"I'm so sorry," Ludmila sputtered, the gun dropping, and Ally smiled weakly.

"It's all right," the Magos said.

She really wasn't. She'd had to bite down the urge for one of her mechandrites to smash the baseline into a bulkhead in reaction to being shot, but an immediate analysis of the Lieutenant and her charges, as well as a pheromone analysis, indicated an only too human fear.

And an odd sense of... anger.

Garen stepped up to the alcove. "Ludmila? what's happened to the rest of the ship?" He looked to the children. "Peta, Von, Tyne?" The three hesitantly nodded at the pilot.

"I..." Ludmila began, and she took a breath, a long one, which almost turned into a sob but was clamped down. "I was walking past the PX, and then the lights went out, and the kids were there..." she looked at the Magos and the pilot. "I was thinking about taking them back to their quarters when suddenly the blast doors come down and I start to hear unholy screaming. What was I going to do?" She gestured to the alcove. "I'm not letting any frakking xenos get the kids."

Garen glanced at the sheeting. "So you blocked most auspex scans, too."

Ludmila laughed harshly. "I'm not your air traffic controller who knows how her machine spirits in her auspex work for nothing, Garen."

The comment was tinged with... anger.

Ally did not understand it. "Do you think we should bring them along, Garen?" she said, and suddenly she picked up a spike in fear in Ludmila, which she understood, but also anger, which she did not at all. "We can bring the Lieutenant and ask the children to stay here and not come out..." she started, but then the Lieutenant raised a hand in remonstration. The pilot gently put his hand on the Lieutenant's. She calmed down.

Garen turned to the Magos. "Ally... I think it's best the kids stay here with Ludmila." He turned to the children. "You stay with the LT, all right? Just sit tight." He fished in his coat, and out came an imperial chocolate ration bar.

* * *

Why was the Lieutenant so angry?

Why had Ludmila barricaded herself with children who were not family; shielded herself from scans; shot first when confronted by a friendly Magos? Put herself between any possible danger and the children, whom it could be reasonably assumed would follow instructions not to move anywhere?

Such questions plagued Ally Terenas, as Garen steeled himself for whatever was beyond the next door.

As such, the question her cogitators posed as to why every piece of wiring in the maintenance alcove 770D had been bent to right angles was of low priority.

TBC...


End file.
